Shut Up And Let Us Be Sad: Why There’s Nothing Wrong With Mourning A Celebrity Death

Why are people so dismissive of those who mourn celebrity deaths? This question has arisen with disturbing frequency over the past several months, as stars like Cory Monteith, Paul Walker and now Philip Seymour Hoffman have passed away under tragic and surprising circumstances.

You most likely learned of these deaths via a Facebook post, a tweet or an SMS notification from your favourite mobile news source. After you absorbed the shock — and it’s not hyperbolic to call their deaths shocking — you may also have shared the news online. In the age of social media, everybody wants to (and can) be a part of the immediate public mourning — to “put out their statement,” so to speak. Lots of us post a favourite film or video clip. Some post a gorgeous portrait of the deceased celebrity, or retweet somebody else’s remembrance. Others bang out a few hasty sentences, or even a long-winded story of their own — anything to validate the most tenuous of personal connections (“I met Paul Walker on the street once. Asked him to take a picture with me and he generously agreed. What a lovely, humble human being. So sad.”). Especially when these deaths involve young (Monteith), handsome (Walker) and/or insanely talented (Hoffman) people, these desires to eulogise get amplified in a big way.

Each of the men I mention were beloved by three fairly disparate fan bases: hard-core Gleeks; Fast & Furious devotees; cinephiles and theatregoers thrilled to see one of the world’s best character actors find stardom. As such, each of them was mourned, deeply and widely, by people they’d never actually met and, had they lived years longer, almost certainly never would.

But along with that mourning came some other unfortunate staples of the viral age: the mocking and the misgivings. Just as social media allows everybody to attend a virtual worldwide wake for the newly deceased, it also invites those who don’t engage with or endorse “celebrity culture” to air their opinions.

Okay Seymour Hoffman is dead, RIP. NOW CAN THE MILLIONS STARVING/HOMELESS HERE AND ABROUD GET THE SAME LOVE! #takecareoftheliving

— Theresa (@terribaby8) February 2, 2014

Now, given you’re reading Junkee, there’s a pretty good chance you know (and love) popular culture. As such, you probably also know your celebrities (loving them is optional) and why they’re famous, are familiar with their filmographies/discographies and can perhaps even rattle off where they were last spotted eating lunch, what they ate, and whose designs they were wearing.

Plenty of reasonable people find all of this “fame” stuff useless and distracting. Maybe they hate Hollywood excess. Maybe knowing stars’ names and credits and personal dramas just isn’t their thing. Maybe they’re too busy raising families, saving lives, or running a business to give a whit. That’s fine! I, for instance, am baffled by all things tennis. People watch that? And it entertains them? Whatever works.

Yet for some reason, these people still can’t resist throwing in their two cents, usually in the form of a backhanded status update or tweet or meme.

Like this:

Or this:

Or, in the incredibly tacky case of Supernatural star Jared Padalecki, this:

In an effort to remind us that they just don’t care or that, you know, there are far more important things to worry about than a celebrity’s death or that death by drug overdose calls for absolutely no sympathy, these people play right into things by, well, sharing their views on the matter.

Are they allowed to do that? Of course they are. Are their arguments valid? Sure, to a point. Do they do themselves any favours with this kind of morally superior vamping? Not really.

If You Don’t Have Anything Nice To Say…

These reactions take a few different tacks. When drug or alcohol addiction are culpable in a celebrity’s passing, the moralising and shaming begin.

Fed up of seeing this Hoffman all over the tele, who cares he was a drug addict and deserved it #goodriddance

— Tony Stark (@joetstark) February 3, 2014

See, for instance, the original headline Daily Telegraph used to announce Hoffman’s death, before a deluge of outrage forced them to change it:

But it’s a different type of manufactured furore which erupts when a celebrity dies alongside somebody who isn’t famous. After Walker died, for instance, people were up in arms over the lack of press attention given to Roger Rodas, the man who was driving the car and who also died. As if outsized attention to your death is to be expected when you’re not a household name in the first place.

It’s a silly, specious argument, and it’s also insensitive to each man’s legacies. Paul Walker was no better or worse than Roger Rodas because he was famous; vice versa, Roger Rodas’ death was no less important just because it didn’t generate a front-page headline.

A lot of people like to play the moral equivalency card when they feel people have taken their bereavement too far. The argument goes something like this: “Thousands of people die every day. A celebrity’s death is no more or less important.”

Here’s one example.

And here’s another.

Now, it’s hard to argue against each point, as they’re valid on a basic level. Thousands of people die every day, and I’m certain most of them brought joy into at least one other life before they passed. But every time somebody feels the need to remind me that their deaths weren’t mourned and shared and discussed by legions of fans, I want to grab them by the shoulders, shake them and say, “No shit! Most of us recognise that! That doesn’t make us any less sensitive than those who knew and loved them well!”

Celebrities Matter To People, And There’s Nothing Wrong With That

I met Hoffman in August 2005, just before the release of Capote, the movie that won him an Oscar and cemented his status as one of his generation’s most gifted actors. We met at Gabriel’s, a restaurant on New York’s Upper West Side, for a profile I was writing. It remains the most fulfilling interview of my career thus far — he was engaging, verbose and quietly dignified. Having just re-read the transcript, I don’t see one statement from Hoffman that felt canned, avoided or swatted away. Every answer was a proper response, without the air of manufacture.

About halfway through, I pointed out that Hoffman had never been a gossip magnet — the kind of star who’s constantly in the tabloid crosshairs — and suggested he was more than okay with that. Here’s his response:

It’s kinda like, you know… [Pauses] If you know a lot about a person’s personal life as you’re watching them in their profession, it only feeds the beast. It gets in the way of your enjoyment of what they do. The more you know about something or somebody, the more baggage you bring to the theatre as you enter it to watch them play their role.

I almost want to say, ‘Just trust me, it’s just better. If I do the job well enough, you’ll enjoy it more if you know less about who I am.’ I don’t mind your knowing that I live in New York and I have a girlfriend Mimi and we have a son and my mom is a judge — I mean, whatever. But when you start knowing where I ate on Tuesday night and who I was hanging out with and what I said to them — and it happens to a lot of celebrities and some of it is their own doing and some of it is not — it just works against the enjoyment that people have as they watch you.

In light of how Hoffman died, this answer is uncomfortably revealing. One of the reasons so many of us loved watching him perform was because he never really invited us to pay attention to all the banal details of his off-screen life, a welcome stance that allowed us to focus on just how damned good an actor he was. As far as we know, he wasn’t using heroin at the time of Capote’s release. But imagine he had been. And imagine you’d been aware of it. How would you have felt about him then? The sad fact — to which he presciently alludes in that quote — is that from this point, watching his film performances will always be a slightly morbid exercise, because now we’re all aware of how he died and what caused it.

I spent two hours with Hoffman; two hours in which I was expected to get at some essential truth about the guy and craft it into a 1,500-word story for his fans. That’s two hours more than 99% of the people who’ve shared their grief at his passing in a public forum in the past day ever got. But like them, I can safely say I didn’t actually know Hoffman — or Monteith, or Paul Walker — at all. We knew plenty of details about them, but they were still just as much strangers to us as, say, Shirley Hyams, an 89-year-old woman from Cincinnati who died a day before Hoffman. The difference was that we knew of them and, to borrow a well-worn cliché about celebrities, we invited them into our homes on a pretty regular basis. As a result, many of us couldn’t help caring about them.

I picked Shirley at random to illustrate a point, which is this: her death meant something to her family and friends and those who loved her. It did not, I’m sorry to say, mean much to the rest of us. Untold numbers of budding/struggling/accomplished actors and actresses didn’t look to Shirley for inspiration to help improve their craft. Shirley, as far as we know, didn’t entertain millions through her work. She didn’t perform in some of the most celebrated films of her time. She probably meant the world to a small clutch of people. Hoffman, by virtue of his profession and its reach, meant the same to far more. Like it or not, that’s just facts.

As such, the outpouring of grief for Hoffman is right to scale. And loudly whinging about it to your followers and friends in an effort to somehow be above all of this silly celebrity stuff actually just makes you look like a jerk. Yes, he made some questionable life choices that ultimately hastened his demise, and left three young children without a father. He may not have devoted his life to working in refugee camps, or fighting for his country on the front lines in combat, or counselling disadvantaged inner-city youth on a full-time basis. You didn’t have to like the man or his work, and you most certainly don’t have to approve of the manner in which he died.

But all the grotty, depressing details of his death at the sharp end of a heroin needle don’t make him any less worthy of salutation from someone who has been personally affected, touched, or even changed by the work he did onscreen and onstage. He may not have been able to save himself but, through his monstrously effective performances, he very well may have saved somebody else. Let them mourn — and if you have an issue with the way they’re going about it, log off and let them do it in peace.

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Nicholas Fonseca is a freelance writer and editor and (sometime) master of film studies student based in Sydney. A former editor at Madison, Fonseca has written for WHO, Sunday Life and Foxtel magazines; prior to his arrival in Sydney, he was based in New York City, where he spent a decade as a staff member with Entertainment Weekly.